The Worst Video Game Ever Made

If you’ve been a gamer for a while then you’ve probably played plenty of different games. Some games (League of Legends) are obviously much better than other games (Dota 2). But did you know that in 1982 somebody made a video game so bad it destroyed an entire company?

Who, When and Where?

Flashback to July 1982 and one of the world’s biggest and successful tech companies Atari has just bought the rights to a film. This film wasn’t just any old film, it was ET the Extra-Terrestrial and was directed by Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg.

24 year old Howard Scott Warshaw was the programmer tasked with designing and making the game. After recently finishing the video game of Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg considered Howard a genius and was handpicked by him to work on the new project.

Howard got the call from the CEO of the company asking if he was up for the job and he joyfully accepted. Back in 1982 games were manufactured and distributed on cartridges that took weeks to make. The plan was to get the game made and released for Christmas, with hopes it would be a huge hit and they would fly off the shelves.

The Impossible Task

The only problem was the CEO wanted the game complete and finished on the 1st September. That left around 5 weeks to design and program the whole game from scratch. Normally games took anywhere from 6 to 8 months back then and a lot of time and planning had to go into them. To make an entire game 5 weeks was a challenge to put it lightly.

The CEO told Howard to design the game over the next few days and be ready on Thursday morning visit Spielberg. Howard spent the days refining his ideas until he settled on an adventure game. The idea was a game where the player had to help ET phone home by collecting components to make a space telephone. The player would also have to dodge government agents and scientists to complete the game.

He showed the plans to Spielberg and although he wasn’t originally pleased with the idea he managed to talk him out of the idea of making a Pac-Man knock off. The main thing was to make him like the idea as it was probably the only one that could be made in 5 weeks!

Atari’s Master Plan

The company Atari, put a lot of money into this game and they needed it to be a success. Atari had sales of $2 billion but was losing market share to the home computers market such as the Commodore 64.

Howard set off on the almighty challenge spending countless hours a day programming. He started off commuting to the office everyday but then released he still had to go home and night and eat. To make his life easier he decided to work from home so he could spend even more time programming. In fact the only time he stopped was to eat and sleep.

After hours of long work Howard managed to complete the game. His initial reaction was that he couldn’t believe he managed to complete it in time. Atari ordered 4 million copies of the game and budgeted an estimated $5 million on the advertising campaign. At the time it was the biggest ever campaign for a video game. Adverts for the game ran for weeks with even Spielberg himself featuring in the adverts.

Howard, the sole programmer of the game received the V.I.P treatment for his work and was flown to the London premier of the movie. The big bosses of Atari believed as long as they put ET’s name on, it would sell millions.

The Release

On the initial launch the game was right up there on the top sellers list for a while. But word began to spread that there were many problems with the game. Although the game was completely finished and was a stable release, the game wasn’t perfect. There were points in the game where players would fall into pits and get stuck.

Obviously players were not happy about this and once the word got out many people decided not to buy it. A few months later Atari announced that the sales for the year were disappointing and the value of the company’s stock dropped dramatically. Out of the 4 million produced they had just sold over 1.5 million. By 1983 Atari had announced losses of $310 million.

The game was a massive flop. Considering the amount of money spent on the marketing and producing the cartridges the whole thing was a disaster. Due to Atari over investing in the game and a large shift in technology the company ended up going bankrupt in 1984.

The game was so bad that an Atari manager buried the game and and other titles to the sum of 728,000 cartridges. Today the game has become a legend in its own right, with it often being cited as the worst video game ever released and one of the biggest commercial failures.

Nowadays many games take years to produce and a lot more effort goes into making them. Although they can be very hit and miss with fans it’s unlikely there will ever be a game as bad as this.

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